Vinitha Venkatraman is a social entrepreneur and Co-Founder of VIVA Development Strategies who has a long standing relationship with Ambuja Foundation. She joins us at Thrive, as a guest writer – sharing her insights and an outside perspective of some of the key facets of our work at Ambuja Foundation.

Sanjib (name changed) is a long haul truck driver who, like most other truckers across the country, spends an average of 12 hours on the road – driving freight over long distances and spending months at a time on the road. Irregular schedules, long hours, little physical activity, limited access to healthy food on the road, and stress make healthy living a challenge for long-haul truck drivers.

The spare room in Mehra Sheikh’s house has been transformed. It’s become a sanitary pad production centre and it bustles from day to night as women come and go, meeting strict production targets for the new menstrual hygiene product.

The success of the Swacch Bharat Mission Gramin Phase 1, has played a crucial role in increasing sanitation facilities at household level across the country and many studies have attributed to a positive impact on community health especially women and children resulting in improvement in health indicators like child mortality rate and for that, there is a lot to celebrate. However rural India still has a long way to go to transform its solid and liquid waste management systems in order to achieve targets surrounding the sustainable development goals, and to bring to life Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of ‘total sanitation for all.’

‘Mental Health in Rural India? Is there a need?’ This is a question that echoes in the minds of many as we emerge from the intense stress of the pandemic, and is a key point of query for development sector professionals working at the grassroots.

The Swacch Bharat Mission was undoubtedly the biggest public health, behaviour change campaign in the world, with the Government undertaking the gargantuan task of making India Open Defecation Free. Whilst a lot of hurdles remain, the impacts are clear - *110 million household and public toilets were built in just 5 years and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that over 300,000 lives were saved as a result of fewer cases of diarrhea.

Proper nutrition till 5 years of age is the foundation to a healthy all rounded life. In a report published by UNICEF, 69% of deaths under the age of 5 was attributed to malnutrition.

Health and Safety (H&S) has been a primary focus of Ambuja Foundation across all programs with customized interventions for different target audiences. Whilst the majority of the year saw efforts focus on COVID-19, the team still managed to carry out a variety of interventions at the beginning of the year at SEDI:

75-year-old Vitthal Jayram Vinchu was distraught when he learnt he was ailing from High Blood pressure and Diabetes. Over the past few months, he had been perpetually thirsty and hungry. Subsequently, his weight had swelled to 110 kgs, making it arduous to do any physical activity. His gait had also assumed a limp and needed the support of a walking stick. That was when he decided to visit a government hospital and get a health checkup done.

All her life, Amreika Patel dreamed of being a nurse. But at just 13 years of age, her father passed away and she soon got married. For almost 13 years she was restricted to housework and her nursing dreams seemed but a pipe-dream.

Ambuja Foundation is promoting adolescent health through a peer led, life skills based, education programme called APEKSHA (Adolescent Peer for Enhancement of Knowledge, Skill and Healthy Association) - reaching over 28,170 youth by training just 970 peer educators from 72 Schools.

The health team of Ambuja Foundation has been at the forefront during this critical time in creating awareness about COVID19 in our core villages